Slash

Vacation, but other than “Rag Doll” and “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” the songs most played on the airwaves were nothing but the weak and weaker. There was Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again,” Heart’s “Alone,” Great White’s “Once Bitten,” and Billy Idol’s cover of “Mony Mony.” And somewhere between the two there we were: neither Guns N’ Roses nor Appetite for Destruction fit into any preexisting niche in the musical landscape of 1987. As much as we’d “made it,” it was the same as it ever was: we had to build a space of our own.

Appetite for Destruction was released on July 21, 1987, to little or no fanfare at all. To be kind, I’ll say that it was a hit on the underground circuit; it had a small cult following, transmitted by word of mouth, like Metallica’s Kill ’em All. We found early fans in The Cult after their lead singer, Ian Astbury, saw us play at the Marquee in London; later on he told me that he knew immediately that we’d be huge. He got us signed up as the opening band on a two-month leg of their North American tour in support of Electric.

That album was produced by Rick Rubin and was a major departure from The Cult’s Goth-influenced roots. It made sense that they’d want a hard-rock band like ours supporting them because Electric sounded like it was recorded in 1973. The Cult had a huge worldwide audience by then, and though Electric would be the album to do it for them, they hadn’t quite hit it big in America. I was exposed to that record through the girl I was sleeping with at the time. Chicks were good for finding out what was cool at the moment—they always seemed to be up on the records of the day.

Before we took off on The Cult tour, we shot the “Welcome to the Jungle” video, which was our first. It was a two-day shoot. The first day we shot all of those little vignettes that define each of us as individual characters in the video: Axl gets off a bus, Izzy and Duff are seen out the street, etc. If you blink, you miss my appearance: I’m the drunk sitting in a doorway with the brown-bagged bottle of Jack. We shot those scenes on La Brea, outside of some little storefront that our director, Nigel Dick, had found. I was not unfamiliar with the long and arduous process of making videos: I was an extra in a Michael Schenker video for a song off his Assault Attack album in 1982.

Over the course of the evening as I waited for my call time for “Jungle,” I got plastered drunk. I found the constant cycle of “hurry up and wait” that is standard on any kind of film or video shoot so boring that by the time they were ready for my scene, it was more of a candid portrait. That video captured where I was at in that moment: a minute after the director called “Cut,” I got into a fight with our manager, Alan Niven, over what I have no idea—and neither did he. I told him off and then I wandered into the night and hitchhiked to who knows when.

The next night we shot at the Park Plaza Hotel, which was the location of Dale Gloria’s Scream Club. Dale is a local nightlife celebrity in Los Angeles who has owned and run a variety of clubs—Scream was the most legendary. That second day, yet again, was another long shoot on location, but at least we shot the band performing the song live. We made it an event: we did the song on a closed set, then we opened it up and filled the club with an audience and played it three times in a row. That was cool. And that was a wrap on our first video.

A day or two, maybe a week, later, we set off on tour with The Cult to support them during a two-month, August-and-September swing through Canada, the West Coast, and the South. That tour was great; none of the usual bullshit happened where the headliner predictably sabotages the opening band by turning down their sound so that they make that much more of an impact when they take the stage. I think The Cult had circumvented that issue by choosing us; a band from L.A. that no one had heard of. Whatever it was, there was great camaraderie among our bands. Ian and Axl got along very well and Duff and I hung out a lot with bassist Stephen “Hagus” Harris. Still, I’m not quite sure that they knew what they were getting when they hired us. One thing was for sure: this outing confirmed my passion for touring. These were meager beginnings, but they launched my enduring love affair with the road—I remain an irretrievable road dog as of this writing.

Another pattern that has endured in my life established itself again at this time: I had ditched heroin as a daily habit and made the smooth transition into booze. We were working now, so I’d predictably replaced one addiction with another, exchanging smack for full-tilt drinking. I was naive to think that I was so tough that I’d gotten myself all clean and had no problems with addiction whatsoever—the truth was I hadn’t changed anything. I’d only substituted the substance. I transitioned my addiction from illegal to legal; because alcohol was acceptable to everyone. It was an expected facet of everyday life in rock and roll, so if I was drinking heavily but not shooting up, those in my circle were fine with that. What did they know?

From that point on, aside from a few isolated incidents, it was a few years before I had serious heroin issues again. The interesting thing is that in the interim, my entire point of view on heroin changed: soon it was as if I’d never tried it at all. Somehow I totally forgot about it, and lost all interest in it, even when people around me did it in my presence. I still don’t get it. I did take my drinking to an all-time high as a replacement, though I tried really hard to be mindful of never exceeding my limitations before a gig.

A long time ago someone had taught me that the best cure for a hangover was another drink—the hair of the dog that bit you. That became my philosophy, because it worked; the only problem was that during this period, the parties never seemed to stop, and so began a cycle. I woke up with a hangover every day, so I started every day with a fresh drink, and then drank through to the next party that night. In no time, the parties blurred: I was drinking all night into the next day and into the next night into the night after that. There really wasn’t a day when I took time off from drinking because there was generally a party to get to every day; it was all part of my daily routine.

We were a gang of heathens who thought we knew everything but in reality we knew nothing.

ON THE CULT TOUR, WE STAYED IN cheaper hotels than they did, but that didn’t stop us from wreaking havoc at theirs. Often, the night ended with Duff and me being kicked out either by the hotel staff or the band themselves, and being faced with the challenge of finding our way back to wherever the fuck our hotel was. One night I was so drunk that I passed out on a couch in the lobby of The Cult’s hotel and Duff left me there. I woke up at around five a.m. after just having wet myself in my sleep. To make matters worse, I didn’t have my hotel-room key and had no idea where we were staying. The staff at the hotel would not help me at all, probably because I was soaked in pee and smelled like a bar. I headed out into the Canadian cold; it was freezing, and I wandered around, just hoping I’d find my way. The only hotel that I could see once I got outside was a long walk away, but lucky for me it turned out to be ours. I was even luckier to be wearing my leather pants, because I wasn’t as frozen as I might have been. That’s a wonderful side effect of leather pants: when you pee yourself in them, they’re more forgiving than jeans.

I was just so excited to be on tour anywhere with an actual tour bus, no matter how shitty or unreliable it was. As a band, we were like the scrappy underdog team in a sports movie; we had inferior gear, and nothing but the clothes on our backs, but we had enough heart to win the championship—we were a rock-and-roll version of Slap Shot. We were even playing in hockey rinks in Canada: the tour started out in the eastern provinces and continued on to the West Coast, down into the American Pacific Northwest, south through California, then across Arizona and Texas into Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta region. It was a trek.

In Canada, nothing shocked us but we shocked everyone. Too often I felt like we were the Blues Brothers in that scene when they show up to play the redneck bar and they’re pummeled with beer bottles. We had the attitude to back it up whenever we found ourselves unexpectedly in a hostile environment, which was good… because a few times we did.

Even when we didn’t, all across Canada, we got weird looks wherever we showed up. We thought we were normal, but I could see pretty clearly that the way we carried ourselves was not normal to these people at all—or other people for that matter. We were a gang of heathens who thought we knew everything but in reality we knew nothing. I imagine that The Cult looked at us like a volatile piece of equipment: we were interesting to some of them because we had a unique timbre; but we were a machine that might crap out at any moment.

Cult singer Ian Astbury was really entertained by how explosive we were: he enjoyed it; in his mind, we were ferocious and really hungry and all of the qualities that seasoned rock people envy. He was right: we were all that and more—we were like an M80 in a Coke can. Cult guitarist Billy Duffy, on the other hand, just seemed like, “Yeah, whatever.” He either wasn’t interested or wasn’t buying it. In any case, more often than not, they’d stop by to take a look at our antics.